Fluorescent dyes based on small organic molecules that function in the near infrared (NIR) region are of great current interest in chemical biology. They allow for imaging with minimal autofluorescence from biological samples, reduced light scattering, and high tissue penetration. Herein, examples of ongoing NIR fluorophore design strategies as well as their properties and anticipated applicati...

Lanthanide-doped upconverting nanoparticles (UCNPs) possess uniqueanti-Stokes optical properties, in which low energy near-infrared (NIR) photons can beconverted into high energy UV, visible, shorter NIR emission via multiphoton upconversionprocesses. Due to the rapid development of synthesis chemistry, lanthanide-doped UCNPscan be fabricated with narrow distribution and tunable multi-color opt...

The introduction of controlled self-assembly into living organisms opens up desired biomedical applications in wide areas including bioimaging/assays, drug delivery, and tissue engineering. Besides the enzyme-activated examples reported before, controlled self-assembly under integrated stimuli, especially in the form of sequential input, is unprecedented and ultimately challenging. This study r...

By controllable synthesis of a carbon precursor and with a suitable preparation routine, a series of single-layer and single-crystalline graphene quantum dots (GQDs) with uniform size distribution were prepared from C96H30. It was found that the absorption, photoluminescence (PL) and two-photon photoluminescence (TPPL) show a high size-dependent effect with a redshift that occurs as the size gr...

The use of near-infrared (NIR) light over 1000 nm (OTN-NIR or second NIR) is advantageous for bioimaging because it enables deep tissue penetration due to low scattering and autofluorescence. In this report, we describe the application of rare earth ion-doped ceramic nanoparticles to cancer-targeted NIR imaging using erbium and ytterbium ion-doped yttrium oxide nanoparticles (YNP) functionalize...